Laird GW RG191 (pre-AU915 version) firmware upgrades

Hey team,

I’ve got an RG191 from elsewhere but I know you have a fair number on TTN and you should be interested in this. Corrections welcome. This issue won’t impact the AU915 version that you’re selling now, which is great, and I fully endorse people buy it :slight_smile:

The latest RG191 firmware (93.8.5.18) removes the TTN Forwarder (native) and the instructions are to the Semtech UDP (Legacy) for the Semtech Basic forwarder (so new that TTNv2 doesn’t seem to support it). Also if you don’t move off the TTN Forwarder before hitting that upgrade button it will lock the Lora config on the device, requiring a reset to factory defaults.

All well and good, you can revert to the Semtech UDP forwarder right? Well…two problems:

  1. This means your gateway name changes to the EUI instead of the friendly name. Annoying but not insurmountable. Resets your TTN Mapper coverage sadly.
  2. The Semtech UDP forwarder doesn’t seem to send the TTN band configuration to the RG191. So you have to configure the RG191 manually except…
    2a. The RG191 is now region locked, and the old RG191 being a US gateway is locked to US frequencies, which should encompass the AU ones (I thought) but the centre frequencies cannot be configured – anything > 914.5 is an invalid value.
    2b. The region lock cannot be changed. There are good reasons for this, in fact the reason the AU915-specific version was created, but the intersection of the inability to manually configure and the TTN Forwarder means you now have a paperweight.

It is possible to downgrade although you’ll need to reset and also clear your browser cache. I had a few tense days where I thought I’d bricked it completely, happily not the case (so well down Laird on that front); clearing the browser cache of the old .js is really important.

I have an ongoing dialogue with Laird about this situation, but so far I’m not making much progress. I see their point about the region, but this is an unfortunate intersection of two things.

Hi Bruce,

Interesting findings - I’ll avoid upgrading the firmware on mine. Thanks for the tip about down-grading as a workaround (and clearing browser cache). I’m sure someone else will find this handy until when/if Laird make changes.

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This is now all fixed for older GWs by using recent firmwares and moving to BasicStation on TTNv3 (or TTS CE).

See some links and a bug I found here – the Laird instructions for using LNS are nearly perfect.

I can confirm that once you do this, and if you set the TTN gateway config to use AU915 SB2 then it will tell the LG191 to use this and not whatever it thinks it’s hard-coded to. Which is good. It works well on TTNv3/TTS CE as well.

You’ll want to use this firmware URL instead of the one your device defaults too as well, you can find this in recent documentation (note the “newest” vs “latest”): https://connectivity-firmware.s3.amazonaws.com/rg1xx-lora-gateway/firmware/newest/fw.txt

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